Duluth model

The Duluth Model is a community based protocol for intimate partner violence (IPV) that aims to bring law enforcement, family law and social work agencies together in a Coordinated Community Response to work together to reduce violence against women and rehabilitate perpetrators of domestic violence. It is named after Duluth, Minnesota, the city where it was developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP).

The model provides a method of coordinating community agencies to provide a consistent response to Intimate Partner Violence that has three primary goals:

1. Ensuring survivor safety;
2. Providing a way to hold offenders/abusive partners accountable for their violence, and;
3. Changing the climate of tolerance for this form of violence.

Part of this model is the men's behavior change program Creating a Process of Change for Men who Batter: The Duluth Curriculum. The curriculum is the most common batterer intervention program used in the United States. Advocates of the Duluth Model claim it is successful because it is grounded in the experience of victims, helps offenders and society change, and pulls the whole community together to respond. The CPC Curriculum is designed for heterosexual males, who make up 85% of abusive partner cases that come to the program. It has been described as a well-documented batterer treatment programme by Judith Herman, who notes that it is based on a social model of gendered violence.There are also rehabilitation groups for women who conduct IPV for whom a different curriculum is used.

The Duluth Model Coordinated Community Response has received multiple awards for its grassroots efforts to end intimate partner violence, including the World Future Council's Future Policy Award in 2014. It has been criticized by mental health professionals who focus on individual behaviour and reject a social model of battering. Edward Gondolf critiques the narrow forms of evidence used to evaluate interventions, arguing that the biomedical research model is inappropriate for evaluating the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions.